Republicans Can’t Stop Lying about Obama’s Vacations

Bush crashes a Segway while on vacation at Kennebunkport in June 2003
Bush crashes a Segway while on vacation at Kennebunkport in June 2003
Republicans are obsessed with lying about Pres. Obama’s vacation time. Mainly, they love to trot out the demonstrably false claim that Obama has taken more time off than other presidents. (See below.) But now their latest lie is that the president was planning to abandon the United States on its birthday and jet over to Paris to spend July 4th with his celebrity friends:

The Hollywood Reporter reported last week that Americans living in Europe will have an Independence Day fund-raiser for the Obama campaign. Ben Shapiro at Breitbart.com turned that into an item implying, without saying, that Obama himself would be in Europe on the Fourth of July:

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Chris Wallace Eats Mitch McConnell For Lunch – on FOX

Enjoy watching Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky), who already looks like a fish on the pier that someone caught by mistake and didn’t throw back in time, go blank when Chris Wallace (on FOX News!) asks what the Republican alternative is to “Obamacare.”

But keep a couple of points in mind as you view.

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Romney’s Top Operative Undercuts Key GOP Talking Point, Says Mitt Agrees with Pres. Obama That Heritage Mandate Penalty Is Not a Tax

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In an appearance on Chuck Todd’s oddly named MSNBC show “The Daily Rundown” this morning, Mitt Romney’s top campaign adviser Eric “Etch-A-Sketch” Fehrnstrom admitted that Romney agrees with Pres. Obama on a fundamental issue of legal semantics about the Affordable Care Act. Fehrnstrom said that, in spite of the Supreme Court’s ruling otherwise, the penalty to be imposed on people who refuse to buy insurance under the Heritage Foundation-invented mandate in the Affordable Care Act is not a “tax.”

At minute 4:24, Todd finally gets a definitive answer:

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Frum: Even If Mitt Wins Presidency, GOP Will Not ‘Repeal and Replace’ Affordable Care Act

Republicans will find the task of writing their “replace” law even more agonizing than the Democrats found original passage. The party has no internal consensus on what a replacement would look like. Worse, any replacement of the law’s popular elements will require financing. But where is that money to come from? New taxes are unacceptable. The proceeds of “closing loopholes” are already spoken for — that’s how President Romney has promised to finance his promise to cut the top rate of tax 28 percent. And he’s also promised to increase defense spending.

Republican pundit and former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum.

Fallows: Five Signs That the United States Is Undergoing a Right-Wing Coup

Graph showing rise in filibuster abuse by Republicans
Graph showing rise in filibuster abuse by Republicans

Writing last week before the Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, James Fallows at the Atlantic suggested that by subverting one branch of government — the Judiciary, and in particular, the Supreme Court — Republican corporatist radicals are staging a slo-mo coup right before our eyes:

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150 Mormons Leave Sect But Mitt Romney Stays

mexicanromneys
Mitt's Mexican cousins. Notice anything odd about the ratio of men to women?

The courage recently shown by 150 ordinary Americans whose action could, and likely will, cause them to lose everything and everyone they held dear in their lives, is awe-inspiring.

What bold and risky move did these people take? They left the Mormon sect.

A group of about 150 Mormons quit their church in a mass resignation ceremony in Salt Lake City on Saturday in a rare display of defiance ending decades of disagreement for some over issues ranging from polygamy to gay marriage.

Participants from Utah, Arizona, Idaho and elsewhere gathered in a public park to sign a “Declaration of Independence from Mormonism.”

…The Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is known for its culture of obedience, and the mass ceremony was a seldom-seen act of collective revolt.

Author Martha Beck has written extensively about her own decision to become an “apostate,” as Mormons call the people who leave the cult. She described the threats toward her family in her book, Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith. These included promises to make her husband unemployable, ostracize her children, and more darkly, alert the “Danites,” a type of Mormon assassins whose existence, like polygamy, the church denies.

If you’ve read the book — and if you want to know more about the Latter Day Saints I highly recommend it, along with Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven — you realize how extraordinary was the move by these 150 people who could no longer go along with Mormonism’s bizarre teachings.

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